Identifying and addressing accessibility issues in courses that use LaTeX

Iliria Stenning: This semester at UQ, we ran an early adopters programme across a diverse range of courses to explore how Blackboard Ally, an accessibility tool integrated within our learning management system, can help staff understand and tackle accessibility issues in their courses. Today, we’re speaking with one of our early adopters, Dr Paul Vrbik, on his experience using Blackboard Ally in his introduction to software engineering course. Hi, Paul. Thanks for joining us. 

Paul Vrbik: No problem. Thanks for having me. 

IS: So, Paul, what motivated you to participate in our early adopters programme?

PV: That’s pretty simple for me to answer. It’s just a desire to try to service my students the best that I can as an educator. I’ll basically do anything to help a student learn, and this seemed like a really good opportunity to meet that goal. 

IS: What were your first impressions of Blackboard Ally’s course accessibility tools? 

PV: Initially confusion. But after I was led through the tools with you and some other people, it started actually revealing some pretty useful information about some inadequacies in my course notes. The first thing that came to mind was that the colours that I was using were a little bit problematic in some cases and correcting that was actually fairly simple. I also really liked how it was integrated right into the Blackboard system. So I didn’t really have to go anywhere else and upload to an external service. It was already there for me. So initially confusion but then delight, I suppose. 

IS: Were you apprehensive at all using the tools, coming from a technical field? 

PV: Yeah, indeed that was my main motivation for actually joining the pilot project because I was a little bit incredulous that the tools would actually work in my context. We use a lot of very particular tools like LaTeX and computer code, and I had no idea how the tool set would actually recognise accessibility in that context. 

IS: It was great having you in the early adopters to actually have a course that uses LaTeX because we’ve learned a lot from it. 

PV: I’ve certainly learned a lot as well. There’s a lot of inadequacies at LaTeX at the moment, but the community is actually moving forward knowing that these tools now exist to try to rewrite the system itself to be more adaptable to our students with these particular needs. So I’m quite happy about that. 

IS: So, which of the accessibility improvements Ally identified did you decide to prioritise and why? 

PV: So I think I prioritised them in sort of reverse order of the ease of correcting them. So, the first thing that was uncovered was changing colours and this is actually something LaTeX is really great at because there’s just a main file where we say: “Something like this should be in this colour, something like this should be in this colour.” So, for me changing the colour that wasn't optimal for accessibility was just literally changing one line. What was difficult was actually sort of working with Ally to determine which colour was actually acceptable, which we eventually did find, and we managed to make this correction across all of our courseware, basically instantaneously. The next challenge was that of document tagging, which is a process where the Ally needs to identify the document structure itself. So for e-readers, it’s important to know what part of the document is a title, what part of a document is a header or a definition, and so on and so forth. And it turns out that LaTeX is actually incredibly poor at identifying this type of tagging. And that more broadly, the problem of determining tags with a generic PDF is still an open question in the research community. So, this is something that was notoriously difficult. So, we tried to address this problem but failed at it, but through my failure I determined that there’s a broader community actually working at solving this problem. So we’re slowly actually moving towards being able to create these tags and to create a better document system in Beamer itself to cooperate with Ally more closely. 

IS: And it was honestly one of our greatest findings from the early adopters and something that we’ll be able to pursue further on. 

PV: I’m very glad to hear that what we discovered is going to ultimately be helpful.

IS: How did you approach addressing the issues that you just mentioned with LaTeX? 

PV: Well, I brought to bear my technical knowledge being a computer scientist to computer-science my way to the solution. Really, though, the way that we managed our documents was consolidating all of the relevant styling information into core places. So, again, really all we had to do to change the entire corpus of notes was to address changes in centralised places, which then propagated. So that was quite easy. The second problem is going to be more of a long-term problem, where we actually have to rewrite the library that everything is dependent on to be more compliant with Ally’s tools in the first place. But our initial experiments show us that this actually is possible. So it’s always nice to solve a problem which we know that there’s going to ultimately be a solution rather than just trying to expend energy not knowing what the outcome is going to be. So, stay tuned for a solution. 

IS: Thank you for investigating this for us. 

PV: Not a problem. 

IS: It will have a big impact across the university once we once we figure it out. 

PV: Good to know. 

IS: As you know we had a student who approached us to be part of our early adopters that was in your course. How do you feel the accessibility improvements that you made impacted that student but also all of the students in your course? 

PV: Yeah, well, this is a good point. The fact that there’s even one student in a cohort of a thousand people is enough for me to exert energy to try to improve learning. It did seem like some of the interventions we made were very helpful because we’re asked to do them repeatedly. And I discovered some things during that process as well. Like, for instance, there’s an open dyslexic font that we can simply deploy on some of our exams to help any students who happen to have dyslexia. And actually more surprising, in addition to there being a general dyslexic font, there is a monospace dyslexic font, where monospace fonts are the ones that we have to use when computer coding. They’re quite important because they have a fixed width. And when you’re programming, it’s important that everything that you write sustains a particular width. So even that they made a specialised font for computer scientists was quite encouraging. So, it seems that the information that did come back to me was that the student was appreciative of this. And we ended up converting most of our notes, the mid-term and the examination all into this open dyslexic format through very little labour on our part, right, so we’re happy to do anything that we could to help even one student. It’s worth it. 

IS: Thank you. And it made a big difference to that student throughout the semester. So, in addition to making the changes through Blackboard Ally, you went a step beyond that and you also made a range of course resources available in an HTML web format, for example, with your course notes. How do you think that impacted the student learning? 

PV: Yeah, so I actually think that had the most significant impact among all of the interventions we made. As we were talking about, one of the most difficult problems to solve is that of the document tagging. But it turns out HTML as its very nature solves that problem, right? In an HTML document, you have to specify this is the title, this is a heading, this is code. So, moving things to the web solves most of the problems that we’re trying to address in this programme. And the main motivation for doing it in the first place was they’re very optimised for readers to go through. So, I once worked with a blind academic and all of his resources were online. This really helped him and he really inspired me to go and move all of my resources on to the web for the same reason. And doing so was very easy, right? If you start with a markdown language, one that can generate a variety of different outcomes, like a PDF or a Word file, you can also generate a website. So it’s not like we're maintaining three different versions of the notes. We’re maintaining one version of a markdown that is able to generate in multiple different scenarios, one of which being HTML. 

IS: And in your software environment that works so well. 

PV: Yes, the power of computer science. 

IS: It really is. And it’s great that students have access to it in Blackboard as well because part of Ally course accessibility tools is the benefit that students can download those alternative formats. One of those alternative formats being HTML files. Interestingly, in your course you had the majority of the students who used it download them also as HTML. So, they love working in that space and that additional functionality.

PV: Yeah, this was actually one of the most surprising pieces of feedback that you delivered to me was that a lot of our students are actually having readers read the notes at them, and having not had this technology available to me when I was studying and, you know, preferring to read, it’s good to know that there are different mechanisms by which students want to consume the notes, so I can help deliver those mechanisms to them. 

IS: Did you feel using a tool like Blackboard Ally, which identifies those issues for you, made it easier? 

PV: Well, yes, because I would not have been aware the issues existed without the tool. What was the struggle was getting so many alerts into the notes in the first place, like sort of saying that there’s, like, 600 problems with your notes of particular colour. But once I got some feedback about how to interpret the problems that Ally was uncovering, then I found that the problem was a lot more easy to tackle. 

IS: Amazing. And I love that Ally identifies each instance of the issue. So, it can be overwhelming, especially with something like where the colour contrast isn’t correct, when it shows you there’s like you know hundreds of instances of those, it can be quite overwhelming. However, especially in your case, it was so easy to identify and then also to fix because you, as you said, you do it in the main style file and then push it out to all of the other LaTeX exports. How did using Blackboard Ally influence how you view accessibility in terms of your course content? 

PV: It uncovered things that I never thought I would ever have to consider. Like I keep going back to the colours but I think that’s a very relevant point, right? The choice of colours that I use in my notes that I think are arbitrary actually do have an impact on people who are trying to read them. And so correcting those colours back to something that people could actually read was easy. And furthermore, something that needed to be done. So, just the fact that this was pointed out to me was a huge help to me. For those of us who don’t require these tools, it's hard to recognise the manner by which our tool sets are lacking in various ways. I wouldn’t even have known what to address had I not been given access to this tool in the first place. And the fact that it was integrated into Blackboard itself meant that there was really no extra effort on my part to have to go and seek out this information. The information is now just there. 

IS: I feel like all of us have learned a lot throughout this early adopters programme. I’ve learned a lot about accessibility which I didn’t know before. All of the course coordinators who have participated have also learned a lot about their course content specifically and in general about accessibility. And that’s something we’re hoping to promote throughout the university. 

PV: Yeah. And I think it’s really important to go into the programme with an open mind. It’s sometimes difficult to be self-critical. But if we’re being self-critical in ways that ultimately help the student base learn better, I think that’s a very worthy objective. 

IS: What advice would you give to other teaching staff considering using Blackboard Ally in their courses to improve accessibility? 

PV: That’s a really good question. First, use the Ally tools in order to uncover the problems in the first place because things may be uncovered that you would have never even thought about before. But in our discipline, the challenge of making accessible documentation is quite difficult; a lot of us are using particular document systems in order to render things like mathematical equations, which are in 2D, we use a lot of pictures or images or plots, we have lots of computer code. So I would say try to use the tool sets that are already available out there and integrate them into your workflow and you may actually find that it is easier to solve these problems as long as you do so correctly. I think something that we tried, that ended up being a failure, was sort of solving these problems in a patchwork, and then once we stood back and we said OK, we have to solve the central issues here by going to the very bottom of this source and changing it there, and once we did that and all the solutions propagated to everything and then we had solved the problem comprehensively. The second thing I’d add is that the most significant change that all of us can make in engineering is deploying all of our resources on the web as well, right. Because the web is truly optimised to support accessibility tools in its natural state and utilising things that we use like LaTeX or any type of markdown. It’s actually quite simple to generate these websites. And there’s a lot of resourcing and support at the university that pre-exists for getting those on to the web. 

IS: I think one of the biggest lessons learned from the early adopters based on feedback so far is, as you said, fixing things in little patchwork components here and there, while it may improve accessibility and push the needle a little bit, what we’re really trying to use this tool for is to find the heart of the issues and address them as a whole because we don't want to be making more work for people. We don’t want to have to be going back retrospectively and fixing all of this content. We’re really trying to, I guess, raise awareness, so that staff can make these changes moving forward and to save as much time as possible in doing that.

PV: I would wholeheartedly agree and I think that through a process of tool-sharing, this should make this process a little bit easier so none of us are duplicating the work that other people are doing.

Iliria Stenning is senior e-learning designer and adviser in the Institute for Teaching and Learning Innovation, and Paul Vrbik is senior lecturer in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, both at the University of Queensland. This video was produced in collaboration with the UQ Institute for Teaching and Learning Innovation’s educational media production team.

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